


Grace

by thedevilchicken



Category: Stigmata (1999)
Genre: Body Worship, Experienced/Inexperienced, F/M, First Time, Post-Canon, Priest Kink, Religious Content, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-22
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-06-03 19:11:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6622792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frankie doesn't want to be a priest, but she can teach him how to pray.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grace

**Author's Note:**

  * For [evewithanapple](https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/gifts).



The first thing he said to her once she'd woken up, once she'd spent time communing with the birds like her name was Francis and not Frankie, after that, was, "Are you still in there?"

The first thing she said back was, "Well, _yeah_ ," like it was obvious. Then she smiled a wry smile, a very Frankie smile, and she stuck out her tongue just for a second. That was how he knew it was true. 

Of course, the next thing she said was, "He's gone, but he left all his memories rattling around in here." She frowned, sat back down on the bench beside him and put her hands on his knees. Her wrists were bleeding through the bandages. "I'm pretty sure you need to get to Belo Quinto, father, or they'll find it before you can."

He knew what she meant, and he knew _what_ it meant, so reluctantly he left her there in Pittsburgh and he flew down to Brazil. It turned out she had no passport, had never left the country, had never even left the state except to see a Springsteen concert with her mom back when she'd been fourteen. He smiled and he called her parochial as he packed his things to leave, teasing her, and she laughed at the double entendre where yesterday he thought she wouldn't have grasped his meaning, at least not so fully. So, he went alone. And it was right there where she'd said it would be, the gospel the church had sought to suppress. 

She was right: Alameida was still in there with her. At least, his memories were; his memories were, at the _very_ least. 

The first thing he said when he got back from Belo Quinto was, "I found it." He put it down on her kitchen table, pressed his hand to the top of the box he'd carried it in across so many borders, and he looked at her. The next thing he said was, "I've left the priesthood."

The first thing _she_ said was, "Then for God's sake, would you fuck me!"

So he did. Enthusiastically.

\---

People in search of answers started to find their way to her. 

She turned them away at first, or tried to, but he kept on inviting them home for dinner, kept on cooking for them the way he'd learned to back in Italy, and they'd sit around the table and they'd talk while she drank and in the end she'd join in because she just couldn't not. She didn't want to be their priest, though by then she was more a priest than he was. She said she couldn't be their saviour, but he suspected she probably was.

And in the start he was concerned that it was all just Alameida when she talked religion, that at its core it wasn't her, but it became quite clear quite quickly that that just wasn't the case. 

"He used to be a priest," she said one night, to a group around the table with a wine glass in her hand; they'd had to buy extra tables, folding ones that they propped against walls when everyone was gone for the night, that they put up and pushed together so there was room there for them all to eat. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she'd already had enough wine glasses tucked away in the cupboards. "He used to be a _priest_ , y'know? He's the most goddamn pious man I know, and now he screws all the time! And he's really good at it, like, _really_ good. Someone tell me how that's meant to be a bad thing."

He laughed and maybe blushed and she sat on his knee and she kissed him. It didn't sound like Alameida that night. It sounded like her. She had a unique sort of outlook.

They had heated debates sometimes, at the sink doing dishes or over dinner out. The atheist in her joined forces with the Catholic to make her arguments oddly more persuasive, oddly inescapable. 

"I just don't see why people need some instructional text to tell God they love him," she said, one afternoon, over lunch in a café somewhere near the salon. She hadn't wanted to give up work after, and he hadn't suggested she should, even after he'd flown in all his things from Rome and made himself at home in her apartment. She'd asked him to; she'd practically told him to, unwilling to entertain any other notion. "They should just _tell him_ , y'know? Andrew, tell me you love me."

He smiled, leaned forward on his elbows over his half-eaten plate of gnocchi that still made him think of Rome sometimes, his life there, everything he'd left behind for her but couldn't quite regret. 

"I love you, Frankie," he said. 

"See? That was pretty easy. No catechism required."

"I love you, Frankie."

"And did you need a church for that?" she said, gesticulating with her fork, spaghetti dangling like streamers from it. "Or a priest? I mean, not just an ex-priest. I don't think so."

"I'm trying to tell you something here, Frankie," he said, amused because once she started she found it hard to stop.

She paused, her fork going still in the air, then she smiled like heaven lit up bright inside her. And when she leaned across the table, when she pulled him to her by his shirt to kiss him on the mouth, he didn't care that his new tie got in his sauce. 

\---

Father Andrew Kiernan was also _Doctor_ Andrew Kiernan. 

When he left the Congregation of the Causes of the Saints, he had no shortage of places to go for work. He could've stayed in Rome if he'd wanted to, just taken off the collar from around his neck and taken on a job at the university instead, drunk wine in bars, espresso in cafés in the afternoon sun while he mulled over his students' work. He could've gone to London or to Paris, Milan, Berlin, worked in a lab because his scientific record was exemplary. And besides which, who questioned a priest?

What he did was take a job at a high school there in Pittsburgh; he told them in the interview that he'd been a priest and left the church by way of explaining his odd employment history, but what he didn't say was now he had a girlfriend half his age who bore the wounds of Christ. It was a tough subject to broach, he found. 

He taught chemistry and biology, did occasional cover for physics, all in an understocked lab where he somehow felt strangely at home. He taught Latin classes after school to adult learners at the local community college and then went back home to Frankie's place and asked her all about her day. It usually involved hair and she cut his sometimes afterwards, trailing her fingertips down his neck. He'd felt so guilty for wanting her that day they'd met, pushing down the notion that she might want him too. By then, in Frankie's place once it was home to both of them, that guilt was gone.

Some nights they showered together after everyone was gone, tipsy from the wine, smiling, kissing, his fingers in her hair, wet skin on skin, wet mouth on mouth. Some nights she was tired, she was too exhausted to move; some nights she had another attack, though those were rare by then, and he'd draw her a bath and wash her hair and watch the blood swirl in the water, swirl away down the drain. It wasn't epilepsy, they knew that, and it wasn't self-inflicted. She believed, and he believed in her. It was more than enough for both of them.

"Do you still have your priest stuff?" she asked one night, while he was grading papers at the table. She'd already corrected his Latin grammar once that evening, much to his amusement; she'd never taken a single class, but the memories in her head - the ones that weren't really hers - definitely had their uses every now and then.

He looked up, glasses perched perilously on the end of his nose. 

"Priest stuff?"

"You know. The suit. The collar."

"I think it might be at the back of the closet somewhere," he said. "I don't think I threw it out." Then he narrowed his eyes. " _Why_?"

She smiled mischievously and cocked her head, told him she'd always had a thing for a man in uniform. And maybe it was sacrilege, but he put on the suit and he put on the collar and when she went down on her knees with that smile on her face, he couldn't quite seem to care what the church would say. 

Her mouth on him was heaven.

\---

They kept a crucifix on the wall above the bed. 

It was already there when he got back from Belo Quinto, hanging from a nail Frankie had hammered into the wall and chipped down dust all over the bed in the process, and when they left the kitchen and her plate of pasta there half-eaten on the table, he stood at the foot of the bed and he looked at the dust and he looked at the crucifix. She stood there behind him, wrapped her arms around his waist and peered up at it over his shoulder, too. 

"I really don't think he'd mind," she said, her hands moving down, finding the belt of his jeans. "I mean, he's everywhere, you don't think he's seen two people having sex before?"

He chuckled. He supposed he could see her point. 

She undressed him. He let her do it, let her unbutton his shirt and slip it back and off his shoulders, let her untuck his undershirt and then lifted his arms to help her when she moved to pull it off. He watched her go down on her knees to untie his bootlaces, watched her take off his boots as he balanced on one foot then the other, pull off his socks one by one and tickle the soles of his feet till he hopped away from her, laughing, in self-defence. Then she unbuttoned his jeans and she pulled those away too, tugged them down to his knees and had him step out, trailed her fingers over the front of his underwear, and then bared him completely. 

"So, when was the last time you were naked with a woman?" she asked, pseudo-conversationally, still dressed, hands on hips. But there was a teasing smile on her face as she looked him over, head to toe. He could tell there were places where her gaze lingered, and it made him want her more.

"I was probably younger than you are now," he said, and she whistled like that was somehow impressive. 

"That's some great willpower, father," she said, and she stepped in, stepped right in, and she pressed her palm to the shaft of his cock. She wrapped her fingers around it, rubbed the pad of her thumb over the head of it, and made him shift and smile. "It's almost like I'm your first."

She sat him down on the edge of the bed and she took off her clothes and he watched her do it, watched as she took off her top then her bra and then shook out her hair, as she toed off her ridiculous high wedge sandals and pulled off her jeans, stripped naked, cocked her head, hands on hips again. He wrapped his hand around himself and stroked as he looked at her, stroked as she watched him do it because he hadn't even done _that_ much in twenty years. Then she pushed him back with a grin against the pillows, pushed him down with a laugh against the mattress, and she straddled his bare thighs. His cock pressed hot against her, up against her sex. He could barely think for wanting her. 

"I'm pretty sure he'd want us to celebrate life," she said, as she gestured up at the crucifix then brushed stray dust from the pillow, as she shifted against his cock. "He didn't die so we could drown in Catholic guilt, y'know? We're meant to live and love and be good people. Or at least we're meant to try to be." 

And when she took him in her hand, when she spread her thighs and rubbed his cock between them, rubbed him up against her lips and then between them, when she leaned down and slid the whole length of him right up inside her, hot and wet and tight around him, he couldn't disagree. He loved her. He wanted her. When his thumb found her clitoris and rubbed there slowly till she came, when he watched the pleasure on her face and twisting in her body, it couldn't be a sin. It was beautiful.

Besides which, she was right: when he came in her, when he grasped her hips in his hands and he groaned and bucked and _came_ in her, it was like she was his first. It was like she was the only one there'd ever been, or ever would be. 

\---

She taught him how to pray all over again. 

He'd worshipped on his knees through his whole life, born into a Catholic family, confession, catechism, confirmation. He'd sung hymns in choirs in draughty churches, been an altar boy at mass on Sundays, learned Latin almost before he'd finished learning English. And then, part of the way through his doctorate, he'd thought he'd found his true calling. He'd been wrong, at least in part.

She taught him to pray in everything he did, in every place he went. She taught him to smile when he said he had faith because faith wasn't solemn unless you made it that way. She taught him kissing was worship, that his hands on her breasts or her hips or her thighs weren't sin the way he'd been taught. She taught him his mouth between her legs, his tongue teasing at her folds, his fingers pressed inside her, were so far from wrong she'd hated he'd been taught they were. She taught him everything she knew about sex, and then they learned some more together.

"Let's get married," he said, one night, looking up from papers at the table. She was dancing, a glass of wine in her hand. He loved to watch her. Perhaps she wasn't precisely graceful, but she was still somehow full of grace. 

"Why d'you want to do that?" she asked, mid-twirl. 

He took off his glasses, leaned back in his seat. "I want to show you I love you," he said. 

"Oh, you already do _that_ ," she replied, with a suggested wiggle of her brows.

"I want to show you I'm committed to you."

"Doesn't holding my hair after too much tequila already do that pretty effectively?"

"You know, you might be right." He tapped his fingertips against the tabletop, the end of his ballpoint pen against his lips, as if considering that notion. "So you don't want to?"

"I don't believe in marriage," she said, and shrugged, then twirled again, then wrapped her arms around him as she shimmied up behind his chair. She nuzzled his neck. She nipped at his ear with her teeth. "But I _do_ believe in cake."

She got a passport. They got married in Rome. There was definitely cake. 

And that afternoon, after the civil service just a stone's throw from the Vatican, he undressed her in the sunlight and he kissed her, kissed her cheek, he kissed her neck, kissed the curves of her breasts. He kissed a long line down her spine to the small of her back, kissed her thighs, kissed the lips of her sex. He kissed her bandaged wrists, kissed her feet, kissed the scars on her back. He kissed her mouth and she twined her fingers into his short hair and pulled him closer to her. 

" _This_ is how we're meant to worship," she told him, as he parted her lips with his fingers and then pushed up deep inside her, as she wrapped her legs around his waist, as she dragged her nails down his back and made him hiss and made him laugh and made him shiver. He moved in her, her eyes on him, thrust into her and made her gasp and smile and grasp his arms. Sometimes he wondered if he loved her more than God. Sometimes he wondered if maybe, just maybe, that was the point. She'd never be St. Frankie of Pittsburgh, she didn't want to be some kind of new messiah, but she could help him reach a state of grace.

She taught him how to pray. She taught him how to worship.

He was her eager disciple.


End file.
